A review of The Book of the Short Sun by Gene Wolfe

Title: The Book of the Short Sun in three volumes

On Blue's Water

In Green's Jungle

Return to the Whorl

Author: Gene Wolfe

Publisher: Tor/Tom Doherty Associates

Cover art: this is pretty embarrassing stuff... particularly the cover for On Blue's Water: it makes you feel like you bought a bodice-ripping romance novel)

Length: 1,184  combined pages in trade paperback

Rating 6/7 (astonishing Literary importance—but too dense to resonate; it also relies too much on an understanding The Book of the Long Sun)

Critical Essays

On the Path to History lies Fiction: an examination of Gene Wolfe's narrators

"As always, Wolfe's prose is masterful and his main characters are well developed. The novel starts slowly, however, and moves in fits and starts. Horn, who narrated Patera Silk's story in such a self-effacing manner in the earlier series, can't seem to stick to his narrative for more than a page or two without dithering off into inconsequential meditations on his own shortcomings."

--Publisher's Weekly (reviewing On Blue's Water)

Its accurate that people will feel that the novel moves in fits and starts but terribly wrong in the concept of “dithering.” Wolfe initiates can tell you that very, very little—perhaps nothing—is inconsequential in his books. In order to love these books you’re going to have to love these “ditherings.” We ended up loving them.

"Wolfe's demands upon his readers grow more onerous with every volume. If by this point you have even a tenuous idea of what the series is all about, you'll certainly enjoy the finale. For the rest of us mere mortals, Wolfe's grace and power evoke gleams of admiration even as we float away on a tide of indifference."

--Kirkus (reviewing Return to the Whorl)

Well, the review is really irritating in tone but probably accurate. To like these books you have to really concentrate and really love what’s going on. Anything less, and you’ll be swept into that tide of indifference along with the Kirkus reviewer. To your loss, we might add.

[Editors note: it is with dismay that one searches the net for reviews of books by Gene Wolfe—clearly this “Establishment” of reviewers  is a bit afraid of taking on these books. With so many sites devoted to Terry Brooks and Robert Jordan the dismissal of a truly great author is even more indicative of why Inchoatus is so important.]

We can only echo every critic and knowledgeable fan when we say: Wolfe is possibly the finest writer in speculative fiction. There are some authors who can, perhaps, compete with him such as Neal Stephenson, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Ted Chiang; but for breadth of work, daring, and inconceivably ground-breaking concepts there is absolutely no one better.

Short Sun comprises the best merits and problems with Wolfe. Still, his accomplishment with Short Sun is amazing. Having become immortalized in many circles for his Book of the New Sun and fascinated countless others with his Book of the Long Sun, Wolfe has at least returned to the same universe but created yet another self-contained series: The Book of the Short Sun. As fans will glean from the nomenclature of the title, he has returned to the landfall of the world Blue where those parties who fled the Long Sun Whorl have landed and begun to build communities. Horn, the writer of Long Sun is now the main character (sort of) in this new book that he has begun to write.

Wolfe has always been fascinated with narrators and narrative limits. In New Sun, the narrator was offering an autobiography with all the authority of his “perfect memory.” In Long Sun, we had biography written by someone retelling events taking place years before informed by second- and third-hand sources (and occasionally personal suppositions).

In Short Sun, we have a new trick. Something that, so far as we know, has never been done in all literature. Horn is taking up his book while still in the middle of the story and attempting to continue and retell of events in real-time of the remainder of the story. Needless to say, this can be disjointing. On Blue’s Waters opens when, as the reader will eventually realize, the narrator is roughly two-thirds through the chronology of the series if one were following it linearly. To further complicate matters, our  narrator is suspect of his own motives, at a chronic loss for paper, is constantly commenting on his own lack of time and alertness in order to competently write, and will often disavow previous chapters. This while the action swings from “what has gone before” to present action. For example, much of the third book, Return to the Whorl, takes chronologically takes place before events in the second book Green’s Jungle--at least half of them: the other half happens before the third book. Those same events that chronologically take place after book 3 also permeate much of book 1.

It's even hard to write about, much less read.

These narrative shifts create a deeply intricate puzzle for the reader as gaps in knowledge are constantly being backfilled by later works. The reader is also treated to an amazing transformation in the narrator as he seeks to come to grips with his own very complex existence; as he changes, so does his story change and those events that he finds important. We're treated to how the author, because of events occurring later within the story, will suddenly treat differently an entire story line that took place many chapters (or even a book ago). Those events that should be intransigent in the past become mutable due to the recasting perceptions of the narrator who is still in mid-story.

On Blue’s Waters begins in what would presume to be a very straightforward quest. Horn is asked to return to the Long Sun Whorl and attempt to convince Silk to come to Blue and take up as caldé of a burgeoning but struggling community of New Viron. The inhabitants find themselves increasingly at odds with each other and with other communities that have been spawned from other landers coming from different sections of the Whorl. They hope Silk can bring stability and peace. Blue’s Waters is the most straightforward book in the cycle and offers some immensely compelling reading as Horn travels the oceans in search of a lander that is said to be set to return to the Whorl.

But the story is really about the narrator—his sense of identity and his relationship with what can only be regarded as a saint in Silk: a saint that Horn helped create in every possible sense. It is also the story of a people and their relationship with the ideas of leaders and saints as well as their ability to live with each other. The journeys of the narrator are almost a quest or an instructional in how people can first live with themselves and then live with each other. It is the story of how men hold other men in high esteem and how they live in the shadows of these greats. It is a series so rich and deep in scholarship; so unusual in design; and so touch and compelling for readers it should be hailed as a magnificent publishing event.

Yet Wolfe has always had his detractors and those critics stem from the inscrutability in his prose. New Sun was a difficult book to grasp and nearly impossible to fully understand. Long Sun was torturous in some ways and, like New Sun, often left the reader without fully understanding what is happening. Reading Wolfe is often an exercise in taking small clues from the text and attempting to extrapolate these few words into full-blown cosmological theories of How Everything is Working. Really, creating the worlds that Wolfe provides is full collaborative partnership between the clues of Wolfe and the surmises of the readers.

Short Sun is no different. The inscrutability is here. The dense dialogue is here replete with all of the irritating but inventive accents and speech patterns told in ways only Wolfe can imagine. It is almost impossible to follow the plot line as it shifts and jumps leaving only the concept of the narrator in a stable state and even he is often given to subterfuge and self-doubt.

In Green's Jungle, the second book of the series and notionally taking place on the planet Green, is never once told directly by the narrator but rather heard of in tales relayed by the narrator in much later portions of the tale. The time spend in Green's jungle is almost as foggy as a dream. Return to the Whorl is beset with this same dreamlike quality as the narrator--whose quest has at last taken him to the Long Sun Whorl--has a strange reluctance and fear to disclose many of the details. In fact, most of the narrative for Whorl is taken up by Horn's children once again presumably acting from suppositions of their and clues they've gleaned from their "father."

In short, these are most definitely not easy books to read. Like other works of Wolfe they are immensely challenging and absolutely command the most careful attention. There are many, many readers who are not up to this challenge and don’t want to be. They read speculative fiction to escape and Short Sun is the opposite of an escape but is rather an obsession. Because so many people will attempt and fail to read Short Sun we don’t feel it can ever fully qualify as a 7 and cannot nominate it as such despite its absolute magnificence in literary merit.

Finally, it is unclear if Short Sun can exist independently of Long Sun. While it draws many parallels to New Sun, particularly in Return to the Whorl, such a great deal of the book stems from the Long Sun Whorl that those readers not initiated in that book may be extremely lost. Yet at the same time, no appreciation for Long Sun is required to marvel at the magnificent narration of this book. But the distraction to these readers will be the constant challenge of teasing hints referencing the Long Sun books, which—while little certainty is actually there—will seem to promise all the answers. For these people, it will be sort of like trying to do your calculus homework in a strip bar.

But Wolfe is exploring the absolute limits of what science fiction can possibly offer. To read shabbier bestsellers published by Tor (Card, Goodkind, and Jordan to name a few) and not attempt Wolfe would be a terrible, terrible shame.

Wolfe is revered as an icon across many circles within speculative fiction. Out of his large body of work, Short Sun will most certainly be regarded as one of his masterpieces. While difficult to read, its rewards are immense. But the denseness of the prose and the opaqueness of the plot will scare away many readers and leave his name partially tarnished by the popular press. What will be fascinating to see in coming decades is when the ivory towers of Literature that spread across all of our college campuses will discover Wolfe and suddenly push his name into the syllaba of courses. Melville’s Moby Dick remained undiscovered for a long period of time before it awoke in the minds of these elite. We feel that Wolfe is ultimately destined for the same fate. That will finally determine its place in the canon for Wolfe fully deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as many of those greats.

The Book of the Short Sun will be one of the finest reading experiences of your life… if you can get through the thing. The difficulty in extracting those rewards out of the text is considerable and not to be lightly discounted. Reading these books will require supreme effort. Willing readers will have to be intensely interested with how individuals relate to historical and semi-mythical figures, religion, and their own personality as influenced by these themes. These books are about as far as you can get from the popular concept of “space opera” and thrilling, “page-turning” fiction. An analogy to Moby Dick is probably very appropriate as that work due to the very slow pacing, the introspection, and the great literary symbols stomping through the setting reified and alive. Any scholar of literature should be deeply fascinated by these books.

There is no shame in not reading these books. They are terribly difficult and an exercise in stamina though we feel most people should at least try once. If you have attempted Shakespeare and been turned back because of the language; if you have attempted Moby Dick or novels by Henry James only to be turned away by the lack of progression in the plot; if you have attempted James Joyce’s Ulysses but been baffled by the interior monologue, then Short Sun is probably going to daunt you as well. But we feel the rewards of this book are equal to those giants in literature.